Liverpool, the Press and the May Blitz of 1941 Liverpool Endured More Air Raids in the Second

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by LJMU Research Online “Too ghastly to believe”? Liverpool, the press and the May Blitz of 1941 Liverpool endured more air raids in the Second World War than any British city other than London, suffering 2,736 casualties, with a further 1,173 in neighbouring areas (May Blitz, 2015). Merseyside suffered around 80 bombing raids between August 1940 and January 1942, the peak coming at the start of May 1941 when the Luftwaffe dropped 870 tons of high-explosive bombs and more than 112,000 incendiaries over seven consecutive nights (May Blitz, 2015). In one week 1,741 people from the city, Bootle, Birkenhead and Wallasey were killed (Gardiner, 2011), which, to put this into perspective, represented nearly three per cent of every Briton killed in air raids in six years of war. The docks, through which 90 per cent of imported goods came into Britain, were the principal targets, but the damage to domestic property was considerable. More than 50,000 Liverpudlians were made homeless, only 15 per cent of Bootle’s housing stock was undamaged leaving 25,000 without a home (Gardiner, 2011), and city-centre St Luke’s Church, whose ruins now form a memorial to the dead, was gutted. Other important buildings destroyed included the Mersey Dock Office, the Corn Exchange, the city’s main post office and public library and several more churches. The casualty list could have been worse, but thousands fled to the countryside including the Wirral and north Wales. Maghull, a small town with a population of 8,000 to the north of the city, had made provision for 1,750 refugees but was inundated with 6,000 (Gardiner, 2011). War is the ultimate news story and circulations rose during the Second World War. According to the Royal Commission on the Press 1947-49, the number of national daily newspapers sold in Britain rose by an average of 55.9 per cent from 1937 to 1947 (86.5 per cent for Sundays), but, paradoxically, the influence of the press declined. Radio audiences boomed so that the BBC became the first point of news, and trust in the press diminished as the public, on the front line for an extended period for the first time, could compare their newspapers to what they could see for themselves (Report on the Press, 1940).1 This decline was the continuation of a process that had begun the First World War and is an important focus of study for journalism educators, scholars and anyone with an academic interest in the history of the press in Britain. Liverpool’s May Blitz encapsulated that gap between the printed word and what readers were experiencing, so much so that wild rumours about the city spread through the country. It was the ultimate indictment of the credibility of the press; no-one believed what was being printed so the public, in a 1940s form of citizen journalism, invented their own exaggerated version of the news. Mass Observation and Home Intelligence, two organisations used by the government to monitor morale between 1939 and 1945, chronicled this rising distrust and Liverpool was a particular point of interest. The city was visited in December 1940 and May 1941 and the Home Intelligence reports measure a drop from “reasonable cheerfulness” (Liverpool and Manchester, 1941) to an atmosphere where there was “no power and drive left in Liverpool to counterattack the Luftwaffe” (Liverpool, 1941). With the 75th anniversary of the May Blitz next year, this article will examine the reports that appeared in The Times, the Daily Mirror and the Liverpool Echo and hold them up to the official reports that were being read by the Ministry of Information in the first instance and, ultimately, by the Cabinet. Literature Review Gramsci (2005) argued that the ruling classes cannot enforce control over the population unless intellectual methods are used, including the media, to create an 1 By 1944 the BBC’s 9 pm news programme was estimated to reach 43 to 50 per cent of the population and the BBC recorded its audience at 34 million (out of a population of 48 million), A. Briggs, A., The War of Words, 1939-45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 43. acceptable consensus and, in the case of the Second World War, that insisted the war had to be fought no matter the sacrifice. Winston Churchill, as the Prime Minister during the Blitz, had a vested interested in maintaining a narrative of enduring resilience and for two decades after the war his six-volume work, The Second World War (1952), set the template: These were the times when the English, and particularly the Londoners, who had the place of honour, were seen at their best. Grim and gay, dogged and serviceable, with the confidence of an unconquered people in their bones, they adapted themselves to this strange new life, with all its terrors, with all its jolts and jars (p. 293). His positivist argument was so persuasive that historians subscribed to the tale of unyielding morale until the late 1960s. Taylor, usually a challenger of historical clichés, recorded that, for every civilian killed, 35 were made homeless, with all the social problems that implied, yet wrote of “the unshaken spirit of the British people” and that the raids “cemented national unity”(1988, pp. 502-3). Taylor’s evidence did not come from analysis of contemporary correspondence but was inferred by two votes in Parliament, the second of which was the overwhelming backing of the suspension of the Daily Worker in January 1941. “Not a dog barked,” he wrote (1988, p. 503), failing to take into account the “deep sense of disturbance” expressed by the National Council for Civil Liberties, concerns on the political left and a number of readers’ letters that appeared in the Manchester Guardian and other newspapers. The generic beatification of the British civilian in the Second World War was challenged by Calder’s The People's War (1969) that drew on oral testimony and the work of Mass Observation and, along with his subsequent Myth of the Blitz (1991), stated that the conventional version of events, while true in parts, did not remain intact when confronted by the evidence. The popular image, he stated, was the creation of propagandists with the willing acquiescence of the press: “Some journalists of the period created a myth of the Cockney wisecracking over the ruins of his world, which is as famous as the myth of the Few soaring into battle with laughter on their lips, and equally misleading” (1969, pp. 165-66). Although Calder’s assertions provoked a fierce counter-reaction - Ray (1996, p. 12) described the 12-month period from September 1940 as an “annus mirabilis in British history” – he was hugely influential. In recent years modern academics have used Mass Observation and Home Intelligence reports to revise the story of steadfast spirit and, while none has suggested that British morale was broken by the Blitz, they have qualified the exaggerated claims of universal selflessness and enthusiastic cooperation that were made, frequently by the press. Typical of this approach is Ponting’s 1940: Myth and Reality which reported fluctuating morale, including “depression” and “open signs of hysteria” in Coventry, looting and “wanton destruction” in Portsmouth and Plymouth people questioning whether it was worth fighting on (1990, p. 164). Gardiner (2011) illustrated the state of fear that existed in 1939 when she noted that, within minutes of war being declared, sirens sounded over the capital, Londoners hurried to the nearest shelter and braced themselves for an attack. But they were not in danger; it was a false alarm; the terror and subsequent relief that would mark the Blitz had begun without a bomb being dropped. Gardiner used many of the same sources as Calder, including Mass Observation, but covered the bombing of provincial cities in greater detail and provided greater detail in charting the rise in crime during the war. She noted: The Blitz has given the British – politicians in particular – a storehouse of images on which to draw at times of crisis… There were thousands of examples of extreme bravery, fortitude and selflessness. There was also a pervasive sense of exhaustion, uncertainty and anxiety, and acts of selfishness, intransigence and contumely (p. xv). The role of the press in wartime has been debated at length. Carruthers (2000, p. 55) wrote that to maintain morale on one’s own side, and attack the opponents’, “munitions of the mind” were an integral part of total war and the media received their call-up with other vital industries. Ruling elites, she wrote, echoing Gramsci, had to generate support for the conflict and enlisted the media to help bolster the case. This was particularly the case in the Second World War when the British population was under fire and, as Curran and Seaton observed, “extensive censorship controls were needed, it was claimed, in order to combat the new, deadly technology of aerial warfare” (2003, p. 56). Newspapers, as the principal sources of news at the start of the war, became the focus of this censorship and the consequence was a shaping of content that did not sit easily with the self-proclaimed role of the press as public watchdog. Journalists reporting on the Second World War were faced with a dilemma that, Knightley (2004, p. xi) maintained, remains unresolved to this day: If doing that as objectively and as truthfully as possible means writing and broadcasting stories damaging to their nation’s war effort, what are correspondents to do? Does the journalist within the correspondent prevail? Or the patriot? And what if reporting patriotically involves telling lies? Is that journalism or propaganda? That dilemma is central to this article.

Load more